Seasonal changes should affect the activity of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Nikolay Briko, head of the First Moscow State Medical University’s Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine Department and Russian Health Ministry’s chief non-resident epidemiologist, stated on Monday. He added that the virus should become less active by April-May.

"I think that its activity should become lower with the change of season, in any case. In April-May, the activity of the coronavirus should drop significantly," he said during a live transmission of the conference held on the "Future of Russia. National Projects" portal operated by TASS.

Briko noted that the predictions claiming that the new infection will affect the majority of the world’s population are unlikely. "We have only seen this in the Middle Ages, when the infection was completely out of control. Right now, the measures taken by practically all states help contain it, and there won’t be such a spread of this infection," the expert explained.

A pneumonia outbreak caused by the COVID-19 virus (previously known as 2019-nCoV) was reported in China’s city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center with a population of 12 million, in late December 2019. Cases of the new coronavirus have also been reported in more than 150 countries and territories, among them Russia, which by now has documented 438 cases. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the novel coronavirus cases across the globe have exceeded 320,000, with more than 14,000 deaths. WHO has officially described the situation with the novel coronavirus as a pandemic.